Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C# Microsoft provides the following development tools for C# programming:
Visual Studio 2010 (VS)
Visual C# 2010 Express (VCE)
Visual Web Developer
The last two are freely available from Microsoft official website. Using these tools,
you can write all kinds of C# programs from simple command-line applications to
more complex applications. You can also write C# source code files using a basic text
editor like Notepad, and compile the code into assemblies using the command-line
compiler, which is again a part of the .NET Framework.
Visual C# Express and Visual Web Developer Express edition are trimmed down
versions of Visual Studio and has the same appearance. They retain most features of
Visual Studio. In this tutorial, we have used Visual C# 2010 Express.
You can download it from
Microsoft Visual Studio
. It gets installed automatically on your
machine.
Note: You need an active internet connection for installing the express edition.
Writing C# Programs on Linux or Mac OS Although the.NET Framework runs on the Windows operating system, there are some
alternative versions that work on other operating systems.
Mono is an open-source
version of the .NET Framework which includes a C# compiler and runs on several
operating systems, including various flavors of Linux and Mac OS. Kindly check
Go
Mono
.
The stated purpose of Mono is not only to be able to run Microsoft .NET applications
cross-platform, but also to bring better development tools for Linux developers. Mono
can be run on many operating systems including Android, BSD, iOS, Linux, OS X,
Windows, Solaris, and UNIX.
4
C#
3. PROGRAM STRUCTURE
Before we study basic building blocks of the C# programming language, let us look
at a bare minimum C# program structure so that we can take it as a reference in
upcoming chapters.